Long story short, I have a little 100 MiB USB which I have been using for quite a while in which I store lightweight but sensitive information. Suddenly, it stopped being accessible (maybe I unplugged it a little bit too fast).
I will try to summarize what I have tried in order to recover the data, or, at least, the hard drive to be usable again.
I hope you can give some insight.
Using Linux (Ubuntu 22.04)
The drive is still detected through the native Disks program, despite not being shown in the file explorer, but only as an 8 MiB hard drive. Any attempt of formatting with this native utility results in the following error:
Error synchronizing after formatting with type `vfat': Timed out waiting for object (udisks-error-quark, 0)
I also tried with gparted, which shows the unit as "unassigned" and says that it was unable to find any partition table, however, trying to create a new partition table for the device with the same gparted utility was useless (no error message shown).
Finally I tried with the testdisk cli, but I only obtained a not very eloquent message:
No partition found or selected for recovery
Using Windows 10
The file explorer shows the USB memory as a separate unit with its correct capacity, and tell me to format the drive, to which I agreed to, however, it failed. The Windows built-in disk utility also failed trying to format the drive to FAT and keep showing it as RAW.
Several trials versions of commercial data recovery programs were also attempted, of course, unsuccessfully.
